It isn't often that an electoral-mechanics issue gets wide public attention,
but a recent proposal to shift the nation's complicated but well-entrenched
Electoral College system to a national popular vote apparently has.

The idea, offered by a bipartisan group called National Popular Vote, would
enlist states to join a compact under which member states assign their
electoral votes to the winner of the national vote, not to the winner of
their statewide vote. The compact would come into force only once states
representing a majority of the Electoral College had joined it. This way,
the U.S. Constitution doesn't have to be amended, which sidesteps a hurdle
that stalled prior efforts.

Though National Popular Vote is still a long way away from turning its
proposal into reality, the group -buoyed by years of public opinion polls
suggesting public dissatisfaction with the current system- has made notable
strides in a short period of time.

In the weeks since the idea's Feb. 23 unveiling, bills have been introduced
in five states (California, Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana and Missouri),
most of them with bipartisan support. Several of those states have held or
scheduled hearings on the matter. Colorado's Senate already has passed the
measure. In California, the proposal has been passed out of committee.
The goal for 2006 "is to line up sponsors and get them to announce publicly
that they support it," said John Koza, the co-inventor of the scratch-off
lottery card and a consulting professor in electrical engineering at
Stanford University. Koza co-wrote the book "Every Vote Equal: A State-Based
Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote," which is the
basis for the proposal. Given that most state legislatures have short
sessions during even-numbered years, Koza said, "this is mainly a 2007
legislative campaign."

The idea has become something of a media darling. A New York Times
editorial, comparing the idea to the struggle that enabled blacks and women
to vote, said the national popular vote would be in the "worthy tradition of
making American democracy more democratic." Other endorsements have appeared
in The New Yorker, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Denver Post and the
Chicago SunTimes. The idea also has attracted interest within the
blogosphere.

It's hard to ignore the sponsors' strong case about the weaknesses of the
system.

In an April presentation at the National Conference of State Legislatures'
Washington, D.C., meeting, Rob Richie - an ally of NPV who serves as
executive director of the election-reform group FairVote - noted that the
number of swing states dipped to 13, 16 and 13 during the past three
presidential elections, compared to the low 20s, which was typical between
1960 and 1992. Moreover, the number of electoral votes at stake in these
swing states has plunged  from the 200s before 2000 to 167 in 2000 and 159
in 2004.

This reality has led presidential campaigns to ignore an increasing
proportion of voters who live in states deemed too firmly red or blue to
bother spending time or resources in. Richie's group found that in 2004, the
presidential campaigns directed 27 percent of their advertising expenditures
to Florida, 18 percent to Ohio, 12 percent to Pennsylvania and 8 percent
each to Wisconsin and Iowa. The other 45 states and Washington, D.C., had to
settle for sharing the other 26 percent.

To supporters of a national popular vote, this pattern not only dampens
turnout in non-battleground states but also reverberates for years to come, as youngsters
in the forgotten states become alienated from the political process. By
instituting a national popular vote, they argue, every American voter's
ballot would be weighted equally, and once campaigns are forced to reach out
to voters no matter where they live, many more Americans would be energized.
This column will not throw its weight behind either a national popular vote
or the Electoral College. What we're more interested in is the prospect of
it being enacted. And beyond simple inertia, the idea faces a rough road.
Here's why:

The Purple State Problem. Battleground states like the status quo because
they benefit from it. Yes, battleground status tends to shift over time;
prior to Bill Clinton's first bid for president, California was considered
in play. Still, it's hard to ask legislators to change electoral mechanisms
on the chance that their state may, some day many years hence, slip into the
solidly red or solidly blue column. So, chalk up as many as 159 electoral
"no" votes in this category.

The Tradition Problem. Some states, particularly in the South, are simply
loath to upset tradition. By themselves, Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia and
Mississippi would add another potential 53 electoral votes against.

The Ornery Problem. Some states, particularly in the Mountain West, are
fiercely independent and would likely be skeptical of any "national" change
of this sort. Add another 15 votes against.

The Small State Problem. Small states benefit modestly from the Electoral
College and are usually reluctant to give it up. Outside of the Northeast,
where many states will be more open to reforms such as this, the states not
already accounted for in other categories include the Dakotas, Kansas and
Nebraska. That's as many as 17 additional "no" votes.

The Liberal Problem. National Popular Vote and FairVote take great pains
to insist that their plan is not ideologically tilted. Indeed, NPV's
advisory committee features more Republicans than it does Democrats,
including former GOP Reps. John Anderson (Ill.), Tom Campbell (Calif.) and
John Buchanan (Ala.) and former GOP Sens. David Durenberger (Minn.) and Jake
Garn (Utah). "We're not talking about Bush-Gore," Richie emphasized at the
NCSL gathering. "The more we get away from that, the more we can talk about
this proposal."

That may be true  but our state-based experts say that convincing red
America skeptics that this isn't a liberal plot won't be easy. Of the
remaining states, Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas might be
susceptible to the argument that the proposal disproportionately benefits
big, and thus Democratic-leaning, states. (Texas, of course, could actually
benefit from its size, but that's no guarantee of support.) These could
total another 71 electoral votes.

All told, these "problem" states add up to 315 electoral votes  more than
enough to block the compact.

"It is a nonstarter for a lot of legislators," Tim Storey, a political
specialist at the NCSL. "We're talking about tilting at windmills."
But what if the "problems" listed above do not prove to be a serious
obstacle after all? What about this question: Would this proposal alienate
legsislators' own voters?

Say you're a Wyoming legislator and you've voted to have your state join the
compact. Then Wyoming, as expected, backs the Republican candidate
overwhelmingly, but in a very close election, the Democrat wins the national
popular vote. Under a compact system, Wyoming's three electoral votes will
effectively determine the winner. (The compact includes a six-month blackout
period prior to the election during which states may not withdraw, so
quitting isn't an option.)

Could Wyoming's electors, feeling the pressure from irate voters, waver on
their pledge to support the popular-vote winner? Like the current system,
the national popular vote idea does not simply award the state's electoral
votes to the winner; it keeps the system of human electors. Granted, the
theoretical Wyoming electors in question will be pledged to support the
Democrat, and presumably will be vetted by the state Democratic Party for
loyalty. But it's possible that home-state pressure could push some electors
to hedge on installing a president who has microscopic support in their
state.

Far-fetched? Maybe not. When asked about this scenario, the former
chairwoman of the Wyoming Democratic Party, Linda Stoval, said that while
she likes the idea of the popular vote determining the presidency, she
acknowledged that "the electors for the national winner's party might be
privately and publicly pressured by the opposition party to not cast their
votes accordingly. How would we protect them?"

The idea's supporters say they are not worried. They note that "faithless
electors"  those who disregard their party's candidate  are historically
rare and are just as much of a problem under the current system.
"Electors are not the type of people who care about that kind of pressure,"
Koza said. "They're party activists." And he noted that 20-odd states have
laws that govern how electors cast their vote, some of them with stiff means
of enforcement.

Perhaps more importantly, the idea's backers maintain that public opinion
surveys consistently have shown that wide majorities of Americans distrust
the Electoral College and are positively disposed to a national popular
vote. Their own survey, taken last September, found that in the four states
sampled Arkansas, Maine, Missouri and Michigan  support ran from 66
percent to 73 percent.

"If the Legislature says this is how we'll do the election, then that's the
law in Wyoming," Koza said. "If 70 percent of the people want to use the
popular vote, and the Legislature voted it in, I don't see any heat coming
from that."

In any case, Richie noted in an interview, the people of Wyoming only stand
to benefit from the national popular vote, since their state is utterly
ignored in the presidential race under the current system. The same is true
of other solidly red states, he added  and solidly blue states.

Indeed, the "first-blush reaction when Richie spoke to legislators recently
in deep-blue Rhode Island was that they would get "real attention in a
national popular vote. They figured that a visit to Providence would
generate news coverage that would reach the whole state of 1 million
people."

Ultimately, the debate over the national popular vote may hinge on whether
Americans want to give up a little state sovereignty on behalf of national
imperatives. It's happened before, but for a nation deeply split along
red-blue lines, it's hardly a slam-dunk.